Extreme Makeover - Mitt Romney's PowerPoint Slides
Posted by David Evans on Fri, Jun 17, 2011 @ 10:27 AM
For the past few months, Rexi Media has been working with Waltham, MA based BrainShark, delivering highly acclaimed roadshow seminars in Dallas, Houston, Seattle, and Toronto. Earlier this month, Irwin Hipsman of Brainshark blogged about local Governor and prospective Presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s use of PowerPoint. Irwin wrote, "Politics and opinions aside, we are intrigued by his candidacy because Governor Romney is one of few public officials who goes beyond the teleprompter and takes the risk of incorporating PowerPoint into his speeches."
However, we thought it could be done better - and so at Brainshark's invitation, we've reworked a couple of his slides. Take a look and ask yourself which you find more impactful.
The short clip above shows a couple of the slides from the original presentation together with our alternative version. Best to view the presentation full screen and pause on each slide.
The original slides are full of text, with small images on a white background. There's far to much to read, and the images don't stand out.
Our alternative has far less text, larger, more memorable images, and a stronger, white on black border top and bottom. Whether you agree with the message or not, we think it stands out more clearly. And perhaps more importantly, it's designed to accompany a presentation - it needs a speaker to explain things, and provide a bit more context.
Never put everything on your slides - there's far to much for the audience to read, and they can't read and listen to you at the same time.